The current pattern for plugins that have user defined dependencies is to add a configuration to ‘project.configurations’. This can cause problems as the plugin user may unintentionally influence these configurations via ‘project.configurations.all’.
See this post for an example.
It seems like we should establish the idiom that detached configurations are used for such cases.
So instead of:
configurations {
checkstyle «checkstyle tools»
}
it would be something like:
checkstyle {
dependencies «dependency notation»
}